Block Differential Modulation with Boosted Midamble Symbols

Differential transmission schemes, which do not require any channel estimation, represent a well-known alternative to coherent transmission. While being generally more robust, differential modulation has increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirements, compared to coherent systems with highly sophisticated channel estimation procedures. In this paper a novel block differential modulation (BDM) scheme with boosted midamble symbols (BMS) is presented. It improves the performance of differential modulation, keeping simple incoherent demodulation. The proposed BDM technique is aimed to bridge the performance gap between differential and coherent transmission techniques at the expense of increasing the required coherence time of the radio channel. In this paper the BDM scheme is presented for single carrier narrow band systems and will be extended to OFDM transmission schemes.